RECORDINGS Quick Spins

Perhaps it is no coincidence that veteran Austin singer-songwriter Alejandro Escovedo, who signed with Bruce Springsteen's management company in March, kicks off his latest album with a song that obviously draws from Springsteen's "The Rising." Of course, "Always a Friend" is hardly a copycat. Escovedo's clear Christmas bell of a voice is incapable of resembling anything but itself, and his big-band sound of blood-drawing electric guitars, booming drums and droning cellos is one of the most distinctive in rock. But it benefits from Boss-style pop tightness, well-placed "oh-oh-oh-ohs," a killer string-based melody and lyrics with snakeskin boots.

Escovedo, a not-so-recovering punk rocker who played in the amazing but almost-forgotten bands Rank and File, the Nuns and the True Believers, has always incorporated such hard-edged influences as Iggy and the Stooges and the Velvet Underground into his genteel persona. He has rarely been so explicit about it. On the ferocious "Smoke," over a guitar spitting out one "Search and Destroy"-type riff after another, Escovedo shouts, "Do the stroll!" Later, on the especially damaging "Nuns Song," which looks back to his early days in bands, Escovedo adds: "We don't want your approval!"

The other side of Escovedo is confessional and folkie crooner, and changes of pace like "Sensitive Boys" give the album a soft-spoken country soul. Escovedo can't rock every second, after all; he's 57 and recently overcame hepatitis C, which on "Golden Bear" he calls "the creature in my body." But it was nothing a little raw power couldn't cure.

-- Steve Knopper

DOWNLOAD THESE:"Smoke," "Chip 'N' Tony," "Sensitive Boys"

LUNADA

Thalía

Shortly after Shakira sold millions of copies of her English-language debut, Thalía Sodi, a Mexican telenovela actress, sometime Kmart pitchwoman and Latin pop superstar, launched her own crossover career, one for which she seemed spectacularly ill-suited. After the modest success of "Thalía," the 2003 (mostly) English-language disc that awkwardly positioned her as Ashanti 2.0, she returned to making albums in Spanish, of which "Lunada" is her latest, and best.

Thalía (the wife, it hardly needs to be said, of Tommy Mottola, onetime Henry Higgins to Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez) is guileless and likable, unsuited for even Kylie Minogue-level sexual precocity. "Lunada," produced by Emilio Estefan Jr., the king of meticulously rendered M.O.R. Latin pop, seems a natural fit. It's cheerful and uncomplicated, a hodgepodge of neon-colored dance tracks ("Con Este Amor"), modified calypso ("Isla Para Dos") and reggae ("Insensible"), power ballads ("Desolvidandote") and unthreatening urban pop ("Adventurero").

Powered by the sort of bleating synths and standard-issue beats that would have felt dated during the first Clinton administration, "Lunada" fizzes when it should smolder. The disc's pronounced unadventurousness makes Thalía's ostensible rival, Paulina Rubio, seem like Sigur Rós by comparison, but its tameness ultimately works in her favor, preserving the viability of Thalía the brand even as it reduces Thalía the artist to an afterthought.